


Perhaps Sir Richard Had Not Been Entirely Honest...

by DowagerLadyB



Category: HEYER Georgette - Works, The Corinthian - Georgette Heyer, Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 14:28:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29636022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DowagerLadyB/pseuds/DowagerLadyB
Summary: It's possible some people reading The Corinthian's Lady have been wondering if I am going to Go There. Well, I am. I know some reviewers of the original novel have suggested - given a couple of things Louisa and Cedric say about his past - that Sir Richard is not entirely, exclusively heterosexual. Perhaps he isn't. (There are also some odd reviews that suggest that his being gay is why he falls for Pen dressed as a boy, but I'm not sure *that's* really how human sexuality works. He knows she's a girl, we can be absolutely sure, right from the beginning, because he's had his hands on her body, which I've never seen anyone mention. There is a LOT more *accidental* (or is it?) physical contact between the protagonists in Corinthian than is usual in Heyer).Some people don't like fanfic that could be seen as undermining the central relationship, which is why I've posted this separately. (Also it's much more explicit). But I hope you will agree that I'm not trying to do that here. Quite the reverse, in fact. But when Sir Richard described his romantic past to Pen in chapter 16 of A Corinthian's Lady, he didn't go into much detail, and he might also have left something out...
Relationships: Penelope "Pen" Creed/Richard Wyndham
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	1. Julia, and Afterwards

She was by no means the first woman he had ever made love to, but he fiercely hoped she would be the last. It occurred to him all at once that she would be a different woman, too, in a sense, in a few years’ time. She yearned for children, and she loved life, and food, too much, surely, always to stay as slim as she was now. But he knew that he would always love her, and always desire her. She touched something deep inside him that had never been reached by anyone before. He had a sudden, dizzyingly erotic vision of her at perhaps 40 – long, wild golden curls spilling over magnificent, heavy blue-veined breasts - straddling him, laughing at him as his hands trying valiant to cup her splendid full buttocks, while she straddled him and rode him, gripping him between her strong thighs, and leaned forward, smothering him deliciously. Christ, she was a handful now - she might be the death of him when he was 50, but what a way to die.

It was so different, so vivid as it was in his imagination, from his first awkward erotic encounter with a woman. Twelve years ago…

He had been a boy of almost eighteen and she perhaps ten years older. Julia. She had brought him - they had ridden together sedately - to the summerhouse on her husband’s estate, ostensibly to show him the most interesting frescoes that decorated the walls. Frescoes in the classical style, created to her husband’s design, before the devastating stroke that had paralysed him and left her a widow in all but name, but with none of a widow’s freedom. 

Lord F___ had been a notorious rake in his day, and the frescoes spoke eloquently of that; they echoed the scandalous discoveries made at Pompeii in the previous century, and showed men disporting with men, men with women, and women together. Mouths, tongues and cunnies, huge, exaggerated pricks (or at least the boy Richard hoped they were exaggerated) and breasts of all sizes, buttocks, hands… Some of the positions looked achievable – but how could he be sure, really? – some impossibly athletic. He was as hard as a poker. She must know it.

Julia, Lady F___ turned to him at last, after the silence between them had stretched way beyond comfort. She was a statuesque beauty with flawless alabaster skin, drenched violet eyes and silky dark curls. Her dark red redingote was tight around her deep, full breasts. He had held her hand and kissed it passionately, had pressed his lips to the blue veins at her wrists, but no more yet. He had dreamed about her naked breasts, touching them, kissing them, and her mouth, and woken up damp and sticky; her mouth was deep pink and pouting, and he had heard it whispered at school that sometimes women might, if you were lucky… But she was speaking.

“Do the pictures please you, Mr Wyndham?” Her voice was low and husky. By chance or design, she was pointing the tip of her long riding whip – Jesus - at a vignette of three boys perhaps his own age. One was buggering another enthusiastically, his member the size of young tree-trunk, and the fortunate recipient was grasping the erect prick of a third participant. Much like being at Eton, really. She must have thought so too, for she said provocatively, “One hears stories of such scandalous goings-on at boys’ schools, of course. Is it true, sir?” Was she licking her lips? What did she want him to say, for God’s sake?

“Not really,” he said hoarsely. “I suppose in a way…mostly it’s just hands, though, you know? Each other, hands.” 

“Mostly?” she smiled. “Hands? Well, I think we can do better than that.”

She sank gracefully to her knees, her full red skirts pooling around her, and unbuttoned the fall of his breeches. “Mmm!” she said as he sprang free. She touched the tip of his eager cock with one pale finger, and he jolted at the contact. She grasped him in one hand, his balls in the other, and ran her pink tongue along the length of him. “So silky,” she murmured, “and all for me.” And then she took him in her mouth, and he was lost to all conscious thought. 

It was incredible – for him, it was incredible – but it could hardly last long. There was a convenient couch in the Roman style, and soon enough he found himself lying on it beside her, dizzy. Her beautiful hair had come down, and her buried his face in it, and kissed it. “May I…?” he asked shyly after a while. 

“May you…?” She quirked an elegant eyebrow. “Whatever it is, sir, I expect you may, since you ask so nicely. Tell me.”

“I have been dreaming of your breasts.” With clumsy, shaking hands he unbuttoned the bodice of her habit. Her tits were large and pale, and strained against the thin white folds of her chemise. Her stays cupped them and thrust them forward. He could see her nipples, dark through the fabric. There was a ribbon drawstring that pulled her chemise closed. It was pink. He untied it, and loosened the fabric, pushed it down, freeing her breasts, and put his big hands on them. They were heavy, soft, warm - he supposed he should have realised that they would be deliciously warm. He bent his head and took one of her nipples in his mouth, tentatively at first. “Harder!” she murmured. He obeyed, and sucked. He must be doing it right, he thought, because the nipple was hard now. The other, too. He must not neglect the other; that would be unfair. She wove her fingers through his tawny curls, and pulled him to her, and moaned. 

Presently she gave over moaning for a while, and commanded him to touch her. She told him where, so there would be no mistake. He pulled her skirts up and found her stocking tops, tied with red garters. The skin at the top of her stockings was very soft, and then there were all the abundant dark curls. He explored on, bravely. God, she was wet. And he was hard again – had been for some time. He rubbed his long fingers – clever fingers, she told him, and he was glad to know it – over the taut nub she helped him to find. He found a rhythm she seemed to like, by the renewed moaning, and his bold fingers explored further, and found the source of her wetness, and plunged into it, sliding in and out of her slickness. “Yes,” she said, “God, yes!” and pressed down on him, and fucked his fingers. She came, convulsing around his fingers, squeezing him, and that was wonderful. He loved it. He felt the big and then the little ripples run through her, and gradually die away. He pulled out his fingers at last, and she seized them, and put them in her mouth, and sucked off her cream. 

“You’ve been very patient and very good,” she said.

“I have?” 

“You have. I think you have a great deal of potential, Mr Wyndham. What you need is careful instruction.”

She rummaged in her skirts, and found her pocket, extracting a small damp bundle wrapped in a handkerchief. She unrolled it with practised fingers – thank heaven one of us knows what they’re doing, he thought, not for the first time – and fitted it to him, and tied the ribbon at the base of him. 

She lay back on the broad couch and smiled, pulling her skirts higher, spreading her legs wider. “Fuck me, Richard!” she said. He moved over her, careful not to crush her, and thrust into her. God, God, that was good. He kissed her mouth, clumsily at first, their tongues tangling, and her long white neck, and her breasts again. They were old friends now, and seemed to welcome him. 

She clutched his taut young buttocks in her hands, and urged him deeper into her. His expensive schooling had given him no words in any language, alive or dead, to describe how it felt to be inside her, sheathed in tight, muscular satin, thrusting hard and fast until the inevitable explosion. 

After a little while she dismissed him, and he went on his way, dazed. There was to be more, much more. Next time, she had told him, he could eat her up; an essential part of any true gentleman’s repertoire. Where his fingers and his cock had gone today, his tongue would go tomorrow. There was a lesson plan, apparently. There would be tests. 

It was the summer of his education. She had been married young, to a much older and much richer man of terrible reputation. She had no wanted to; of course she had not, but her family, though nobly born, were poor, and her only coin was her beauty. Had he been cruel to her? Richard asked a little shyly one afternoon as they lay entwined. She was very still. “He does not beat me. I am a possession, like his horse or his dog or his Greek vase. He bought me,” she said very softly. “Bought me and trained me to do tricks like any whore. What difference does marriage make? He trained me all too well – because he made me want…this, which he can no longer give to me. And I know he never loved me. God knows I never loved him.”

He had no answer for her. “I would marry you, and love you, if I could,” he said awkwardly. She was kind, and did not laugh at him. Sometimes when he made her come, she found herself crying.

It was always a little sad afterwards, even for him. They had to leave each other, and tidy away the evidence of their intimacy, and ride their separate ways. One day, she did not arrive to meet him in the summerhouse. He rode back, puzzled, a little worried; it was not like her to fail. 

The old man had died, he learned later that evening. Two days later she was gone, and he never saw her again. He thought he was sorry, but deep down he was a little relieved, and ashamed that he was, and more ashamed to think that she had surely known he would be.

Back in London. Oxford, too. Young whores, opera dancers, rising stars. Voluptuous, that was the word for them. (He was careful, always, though - Julia had taught him that, and he really did owe her his gratitude). But post-Julia he was the pharoah of fucking, the duke of…whatever. Drinking, that’s it. The duke of drinking. Gambling, too. He was a man now, and an athlete, a Corinthian, his broad shoulders and muscular thighs filling out. Handsome, rich, clever, even kind. It was all a bit of a blur, later. Lines, lines were blurred. Crossed. Wiped off the fucking map. (There was what he had mentally christened The Other Thing, in that time. Best not to think about that, maybe). Two blonde whores in a bed, giggling, naked, nipples rouged, blindfolded in velvet, soft, licking, sucking, all at his direction; looked alike enough to be sisters, hopefully not sisters. Two? Why not three?

You couldn’t claim that kind of thing was boring. What would that say about you? But there was still a certain…sameness after a while. 

It slowed down. Getting towards thirty. Not married, naturally. Debutantes: all the same. Literally, identical. Indistinguishable, anyway. They should make them wear name badges. Muslin, hair, teeth, giggles. Big hungry eyes, big hungry mamas too. Breasts, some of them, and some of them not, but essentially identical. Arses, legs, cunnies too, he hoped, for everyone's sake, all present and correct under the muslin. Box fresh, from the virgin shop. In full working order, presumably - perhaps they had papers, certificates, like his horses. Should you look at their teeth? Their…their fetlocks, their rumps. (He really was fucking drinking too much). No. Not done. Caveat emptor. The Polite World, it was called. He was supposed to pick just one. How? Wear a blindfold, maybe, and stick a pin in her? Do the same again later, in the dark, after her father had bled him dry in marriage settlements? 

Of course, the difference between him and them – apart from the fact that he could get foxed all the time and nobody cared, while they had to do all this stone-cold sober, poor cows, poor mares - was that he supposedly had the luxury of choice. They just had to wait. Perhaps their eyes weren’t hungry, or not just hungry, but terrified. Julia had been one of them once, and been lucky, been chosen. Lucky! Lord F___ her prize.

He supposed it must come to that, one day.

There was always Sal, when he was horny or – whisper it - lonely. Long, red-gold hair, famous breasts, a sleepy smile. She was known as the laziest whore in London. Sal had perfected a way of doing - almost - nothing in bed that was highly erotic; as though your magnificent prick, and the skilful, unprecedented way you wielded it, had mesmerised her into a trancelike state. The legend went that she had actually fallen asleep while one of the Royal Dukes was tupping her, and he had been so moved that he had burst into tears, and made her a present of a hundred guineas.

She had once snared a marquis – don’t ask which one – who had set her up with a house and carriage, but it had not lasted. Sir Richard – he was Sir Richard now - had asked her why. They’d known each other a long time. “The thing, is, Richard, at least here they all go away eventually. If you have your own marquis…” The tone in which she said the title was that in which another woman might say, your own pug, ”he’s always popping up, all hours of the day and night, wanting to talk to you, expecting gratitude. Gentlemen can be…so boring if you see too much of them. Fatiguing. Present company excepted, of course.”

“Naturally…”

His own age, Sal, but the miles wear harder on a whore than they do on a gentleman, of course. The last time he saw her, before a species of grey fog descended on him, and it no longer seemed worth the trouble. 

“You look tired, Sal,” he said. 

She smiled. She really was tired. “You know what we say, Richard, us whores. It’s not the sex, it’s the stairs.” 

“Too tired to…?”

“Well, for you, Richard…” After a while… “I sense a certain lack of enthusiasm. Is it me? Because if it is, there’s a new girl. I can get her in. Long dark hair, nipples like ripe blackberries. We can put on a show for you. I wouldn’t mind that at all, and it’s your money. Ripe blackberries, Richard. Juicy.”

“You paint an undeniably attractive picture, Sal, but I don’t think so.”

“What’s the matter?”

“They want me to get married.” He was quite drunk.

“Is that all? Bound to happen eventually. You’re not keen?”

“The young lady in question is undeniably attractive. Everybody says so. A friend of the family. Hah. Very…ladylike, as you’d expect. Damning with faint praise, I believe that’s called. She’s not…appealing to me. No doubt a fault in my taste, rather than in her.”

“Cold? Freeze your cock off?”

“That would rather defeat the object of the exercise, surely.” He laughed wryly, but it ended almost on a sob. “You know what I want, Sal? It’s pathetic, truly. You can laugh, I won’t mind. I want to fall in love with someone. Have her fall in love with me. All that.” He waved a hand vaguely.

“You’ve never been in love?” 

He shook his handsome head.

“Poor little rich boy. It breaks my fucking heart.”

“I know, Sal, I know. Pass the brandy.”

But now: Pen. Always and for ever, Pen. His brat, his darling, his little love.


	2. The Other Thing

The Other Thing… He couldn’t tell her – what good would it do? It would hurt her, disgust her, finish them. He couldn’t, wouldn’t lose her now. She was all he wanted. The grey fog that had been surrounding him, suffocating him, for months – years? – had thinned, lifted. It was on the stagecoach that it happened. She was there, smiling at him, teasing him, making him think he could actually have a life like other people. Not this pretence of it he’d been drifting through like an elegant ghost. The ghost of Beau Wyndham. She was real – he kept touching her, he couldn’t help it – and so, it seemed, was he. Now he was.

And besides, HE was dead.

Beverley. Always taunting, always pushing, never anything you could quite seize hold of. One summer at Saar Court, playing billiards in shirt sleeves, oppressive heat, windows open to catch a non-existent breeze. Cedric not there that evening: disappeared off for some assignation in the village, damn him. Beverley a little drunk, dark eyes glittering, making some remark about Eton, and everyone knowing Richard’s proclivities: poor Melissa. And Richard suddenly snapping. “My proclivities, Beverley? That’s rich, when everyone knows you’ve sucked more cock than Harriette Wilson!”

Beverley launching himself at him, fighting him, but it could only end one way – perhaps that was always the intention? (But whose intention?) Beverley’s hands captured behind his back, his slight frame forced back against the billiard table by Richard’s much larger and more powerful body. Beverley was CRYING, for Christ’s sake, and suddenly Richard was kissing him, hard, and he was kissing back, tongues clashing, greedy hands exploring under thin shirts, billiard balls ricocheting away around them.

After that kind of remark, there was really only one apology Richard could make. On his knees, Beverley’s hands gripping his hair so tightly, right on the edge of pain, urging him on, not that he needed any urging. That was good, that was new - Corinthians didn't suck cock, that was in the rules somewhere, he was sure - and Beverley, later, slim and white under him, gripped by his strong hands, thoroughly fucked – that was even better. 

And he couldn’t fool himself it had been only the once. An aberration. The disadvantages were obvious; they were way, way past anything covered by the books of etiquette here - and he didn’t actually LIKE Beverley all that much... (Later on he’d think that that was the worst of it, the unforgivable part).

Did Cedric know? Who could tell what Cedric knew? But it had to stop. It was just too fucking dangerous, for both of them. It did stop. And he paid Beverley’s debts that time. Let’s not call it blackmail, shall we? Not between such old friends. Not when we both have so much to lose.

And always the taunting, afterwards. Years of it. Sly little digs. The fear. That terrible last meeting, the awful things he’d said. 

No wonder that the first thing he had thought when he’d seen him lying dead, broken, in that wood in Somerset was, thank Christ. Now I’m safe. 

But later he wasn't so sure.


	3. I Do Not Forgive You

He couldn’t tell her. But he’d said he wanted to be honest, fucking hypocrite that he was. And this was not honesty.

He told her.

It was in the carriage, on the way to Brighton. Not in bed, like the last, partial confession. Stumbling over words, telling her about school, which was nothing, really, and then that there had been someone else, later. Not who. Never that.

She was silent for a long time, and he was dying inside.

Then she said, her voice low, “So was that…was that why you wanted me?”

“You mean, as some kind of a substitute for a boy? Christ, no, Pen! Never think that. From the moment you fell into my arms, I knew you were no boy. My memories of that evening are…patchy, but not that part. When I caught you, my hands round your waist, and then you slid down my body as I held you, and I felt – you, just you, so warm and unexpected and alive in my arms. And then in the coach, suddenly you smiled at me and it was as if I saw colours in everything for the first time, and there was no-one in the world but you. There is no-one else, there never will be.”

She was sitting, looking at him, her head slightly on one side, as if considering. He was desperate. “You know, Pen, there are normal men, I suppose that’s what they must be, and some men who only enjoy the company of other men, and there are some…who like both men and women. That’s all. It is never spoken of.”

She said, “I can’t decide what to do…” 

Do? “Jesus, Pen, I’m begging you, don’t leave me. I can’t lose you.”

Before this, he would have said he could read every expression on her face, but he couldn't read her now.

She reached out, incredibly, and took his hand. "I swear I will never leave you, Richard.”

“So then…I don’t understand.”

“Have I said a word of reproach, or pulled away from you?”

He had not the faintest idea what was happening. He'd expected her to question him, thought there might be tears, and anger. But not this, whatever this was. He’d walked off the edge of a cliff, chosen to do it, and he wasn’t even sure if he was falling. Yet. “No. No, you have not, Pen.”

She seemed to take a deep breath before she said, “Since we married, have I been…responsive to you, to your lovemaking?”

“Responsive? God knows you have – you have been everything I could have desired, everything I could ever need or want, and much more than I could have imagined possible. I have considered myself so very lucky.”

“And did you never wonder why?”

He looked at her and a sudden thought occurred to him: because he was not the first! Fierce, hot jealousy slashed at him like a rapier in the guts, and she must have seen it in his eyes, because she said, “Don’t say anything, Richard! Remember I let you speak, and did not reproach you."

She paused for a moment, and then said, “I too have been to school, Richard. It seems to me that men - even good and decent men like you - think girls are like little dolls, sitting on a shelf waiting to be taken down, chosen. With no life or blood in us till then. We are not. We are just like boys. And just like boys we will find things out for ourselves. And that is what I did, with my friend. I will not say her name, I think, as you so carefully did not. I was not…practising for you, or for any man. I would not have you think that, even if you wanted to, for it would be a comforting lie.”

When he did not respond immediately, she smiled a little sadly. “So if you tell me there are men like that, I must tell you that there are women like that too. And that I love you, and want and need only you. Not because you are a man, but because you are you. Richard, my Richard. And now I wonder what you will say in your turn. I knew I should have held my tongue, but I could not. You said you wanted honesty, once, but I see now that you were not in earnest.”

He found it very hard to speak; his clever words had all deserted him. “My God, Pen. I don’t know what to say.”

“Can you not accept it, as I accepted your confession? You said just a moment ago that you could not bear to lose me. Was that not true? Because if you lose me now, it will be your doing, not mine, and I can do nothing to prevent it. Remember, you began this conversation.”

He took her hand, which still lay clasping his, but lifeless, almost as if she had forgotten it was there, and he raised it to his lips and kissed it fervently. “I am astonished, but not for the reason you think, my love. Do you not understand the gift you have given me? I know it’s not a gift, really, or not intended to be one – it’s just you. Can you not see? It’s like a huge weight lifted from my shoulders. I do not forgive you, Pen, for there is nothing to forgive for anything you did before we found each other, and I hope you feel the same. Shall it indeed be like that between us, Pen – no blame, no recriminations, no pretence, no picking over the past, just love?”

“I hope so!” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh, Richard, I hope so.”

He pulled her onto his lap, and she came to him very willingly. They kissed, swaying with the motion of carriage, laughing a little, tears on both their faces. At length he pulled away a little, and said, “I can tell you his name, if you wish, without ever asking for the same in return. For he is dead, Pen.”

“Oh, thank God!” she said with a smile, her eyes at last beginning to sparkle with humour again. “Thank God, Richard, I thought it was Cedric!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been reading Lois McMaster Bujold. I was thinking about the relationship between Aral Vorkosigan and Ges Vorrutyer as inspiration for the Richard/Beverley scene, and maybe Pen is channelling Cordelia Naismith a bit here. Men are from Barrayar and women are from Beta Colony... If you're a Heyer fan and you haven't read Shards of Honor, do yourself a favour, it's wonderful.


End file.
